Leadership in a Generation Y World
Forget Generation X, this is Generation Y! Like HD television, Sky+ and 3G: “We want it all and we want it now” and to bring it bang up to date, “we want it whenever and wherever suits us”. On the breakfast programme this morning 2 bosses were arguing over the pros’s and con’s of a flexible workforce and I’m sorry to say that the older of the two combatants was well off cue.
With comments that ran as if from 40 years ago, “when I employed sarah, I employed her for 4 days a week, now she only wants to do 2 days, which means I have the inconvenience of having to find someone to do the other 2 days”; the classic tight pan of the camera showed the other MD with a face that said “Dinosaur”, as she said, “With some careful planning, mainly done by those whom it benefits, honest boundaries and some personal integrity and to be honest I have a team of high performing individuals who value the set up we facilitate”.
It was a classic example of ‘never the twain shall meet’. Generation X was about rebellion and getting what was rightfully yours, Generation Y’s are a far more subtle group, not neccessarirly by design, but more by the fact they really just won’t play the same game, as a young lady I was coaching recently said, “to be honest guy if they don’t do the right thing then I’m not going to waste my life fighting the good fight, I’ll vote with my feet”.
And that’s probably where the difference sits, the recognition that over a decade of ‘flexible employement’ was foisted onto the population as big business recognised it could reduce overhead via part-time and contract workers, the employment base morphed, and kids grew up not expecting a job for life and in line with improving technology they don’t want ‘flexibility’, they ‘expect’ it.
Case in point I heard a brief few words on the radio, when a lady from Cisco Systems demonstrated their new conferencing facilities at a technology college, “we showed them all this really cool stuff that we’d been perfecting for the last two years, we were so proud of how well it all worked. They just kind of stared at us and one of them said, “so it’s like my xbox then!” and basically that was the end of that.
Generation Y has grown up in the technological revolution and where as we were amazed by the next step (remember how CD’s ‘were’ amazing), the GenY’er predicts, expects and gets! the next wonderment not in years to come but as in the word from Fat Boy Slim ’right here, right now’.
Can the leadership of larger enterprises understand this new demographic? It’s tough, intellectually it’s easy to understand (see above), but to really understand this idea, is to accept that the balance of empowerment is shifting and I predict we are seeing a move to the workplace ‘facilitating’ workers input as opposed to the ‘contracting’ of their activity.
As Wolfy Smith said, “Power to the people” or maybe it should be “the lunatics are taking over the asylum?” Depends where you sit I guess.